bring that fat back!

you know you’re getting older when fewer and fewer of your “lifestyle mainstays” from your adolescence still exist…

…but that seems to be trending back in the right direction. (is it wrong i’m proud i spelled “adolescence” right first try?)

recently (at least around the greater austin area) more an more convenience stores that were other things are now becoming 7-11’s! we still had a few holdouts of the old guard, and conveniently three of them were near three of our six shops i go wandering to (including the one i practically live at on burnet road) but now a few other convenience stores are converting and a few more are becoming circle k’s! as in “ted, something very strange is afoot at the circle k”!

the ruiners of my teenage waistline and subsequently self-esteem and social life have returned to me!

other trends of my youth have been finding their way back – some good, some bad. let’s look at a few…like, i don’t know…SIX of ’em today?

(yeah, that wasn’t planned)

$20 was a lot back then – few shows i went to i didn’t (or couldn’t afford) to get a shirt. i always found a way. but just in case i didn’t, a lot of the tours of my yesteryears are now “cool enough” to where they’ve re-issued the shirts, so if i didn’t feel like dealing with friendly merch people back in the day i can now deal with angst-ridden “mad at the world for no fucking reason” teenage fucks at hot topic or urban outfitters and relive the cure’s 1987 kiss me, kiss me, kiss me tour!

ride my fat stick – i started to STOP skating earlier in life because the boards got all thin and narrow and between my size twelve feet and the fact that i was FAR from thin and narrow (still kinda am, but in better ways) i never felt comfortable on those little popsicle sticks with tiny wheels…but now come the “vintage re-issues” of all my favorite boards AND some cool new versions (santa cruz has a re-do of their 80’s shit in simposons motif that’s pretty damn awesome) so i can get new decks AND they fit me and my feets – plus if you hunt around they’re still around $50 – $60 a deck, just like back then! who says you’re too old to break something?!?

like live auto-reverse! – you’re dating yourself if you don’t get what “auto-reverse” is. see, back in the day before we had MP3’s and ipods we had this shit called “CD’s”, and before that came “cassette tapes”, where half way through you had to eject the tape and flip it over to hear the other side…unless you had “auto-reverse”. that flipped the tape over for you. bands from back in my day (megadeth, slayer, anthrax, motley crue, etc) have been banking big cash from my age bracket by doing tours where they play a classic album, in it’s entirety, all the way through. in my opinion there should be a pause half-way through while we flip the tape (or wait for the auto-reverse to do it) ’cause most of us didn’t hear those albums on cd back when…but maybe i’m taking the experience to a level it doesn’t need to attain here…

viva la vinyl– some of us knew it forever…CD’s sound better than MP3’s (no digital compression) and vinyl sounds even better (“warmer” is the term most of us cling to)…now the hipsters get it to! hasting’s in san marcos has a MASSIVE (by today’s standards) vinyl room and waterloo’s is thriving as well. FINALLY something i can be thankful for from hipster culture…now if i could just get them to wear guy’s pants, use a belt right, and maybe trim their shag up a bit i’d feel this country had a future again!

it’s gotta be the shoes – sue me, i’ve always liked jordans…and while they got a little weird there (i owned the xix’s for a while, which were the weirdest, but i sold ’em on ebay for a profit:)

none of them were as cool as the retro ones – and the public clearly agrees, as they’ve been re-issued in color combo, and even style combos, that i never would have imagined (mashing up two to six different styles of older ones)…for once corporate greed and one fifty year old guy’s inability to let his glory days fade away seems to work to our advantage!

there’s balogna in our slacks! – find the hub network with whoever your provider o’ choice is and you’ve found animaniacs FINALLY in syndication! thanks to the ufc for tipping me off on this! nothing more need be said! now if only they’d remaster ’em in HD…(okay, i guess one more thing need be said.)